EUME
2013/ 2014

Naomi Davidson

Muslim and Jewish Space in the French Mediterranean, 1870-1962

Naomi Davidson is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Ottawa. After receiving her PhD from the University of Chicago in 2007, she spent a year as a postdoctoral fellow at the Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis. Her first book, Only Muslim: Embodying Islam in Twentieth-Century France (Cornell UP, 2012), examines how French perceptions of “Muslim” spaces and embodied practices racialized Islam. She has published in the Revue des mondes musulmans et de la Méditerannée , the Journal of Modern History, and French History, among other publications. Her research has been supported by the German Marshall Fund, the Social Sciences Research Council, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.

Muslim and Jewish Space in the French Mediterranean, 1870-1962

As a EUME Fellow, she will continue the work on her current project, “Muslim and Jewish Space in the French Mediterranean, 1870-1962”, which focuses on the multiple urban geographies of Muslim-Jewish cohabitation in Paris, Marseille, Algiers, and Oran. It examines how “Muslimness” and “Jewishness” have been lived in the context of French discourses about the proper space and place of religion in social life on both sides of the Mediterranean.